Every time I contemplate writing a new blog, I hit a wall—that one that separates us from the cacophony of online exhortations to do, be, or buy something. It seems to me we could all use more silence than we get. Rather than blogging, I’ve been posting more frequently and more quietly on The Full Yield Facebook page, commenting briefly on the steady stream of relevant news stories and studies.

Today I aim to shout over the noise and get your attention on behalf of yourself.

Almost every day there is an announcement (or two, or ten) for a new app or new device to measure and monitor your food, your fitness, your sleep, your stress or to make cooking and moving and living easier. Every one of them has the glam of new, the promise that, finally and forever, you’ll be delivered into the person you are meant to be, living the life you are meant to be living. All you have to do is buy them, use them, wear them.

Smart phone apps and computer screens, slow cookers and bread makers, treadmills and dumbbells—not one of them is as miraculous and capable as your own living body and mind.

It used to be that culture and family both taught us how to love and care for ourselves, day in and day out. Traditional, clan-based cultures had rites, rules, and rituals for social interaction, for food sourcing and sharing, and for emotional and physical expression. Developed and expanded to serve both the greatest good—the group, and the larger natural world—and the greatest potential in each individual, these highly practiced, highly repetitive experiences fed not only exterior cultural manifestation but also interior individual landscape. The safety and wellbeing of the group and the purpose, performance, and productivity of the individuals were assured. (In an ideal world, employers would create such cultures within their companies; if they wanted to, they could, and some do.)

Today most of us live without such rich inheritance from our elders. Instead, the commercial world and much of the press tell us thousands of times a day we are neither lovable nor capable.

Don’t blame them: our culture and almost all cultures on earth today have evolved not to create sustainable and spiritual experiences, not to discover and treasure our hardwired, self-protective systems--our sense of taste and smell, our appetite controls, our sleep cycles in tune with natural light—nor our learned wisdom and developed intuition, but instead to sell us the very stuff which interrupts or even upends our original capabilities.

After all, if we were reminded every day how capable and precious we are, if we were encouraged every day to make the most use of our magnificent internal controls and grow our wisdom, we wouldn’t need to pay for external controls and diversions.

Using recent news to illustrate:

The food industry will continue to find ways to sell us highly refined products that are the food equivalent of an app —that is, superficiality posing as a solution-- so buyer beware: eat the only foods sure to support your health and quality of life….minimally processed whole foods.

The healthcare industry will continue to spend far more to create and market treatments for the inevitable symptoms of a diet of highly processed foods rather than on deeper systemic solutions like long term human-to-human support for behavior change and a re-calibration of treatment practices to make food quality a prescriptive priority and to make high quality food more accessible to patients and providers alike. This is a nice example of putting health-supporting food in easy reach with ready instruction and could be employed everywhere, including within hospitals (using push carts rather than buggies).

The healthcare industry, modern research, and the press continue, largely unintentionally, to promote false truths. There are so many wrong assumptions here it’s hard to know where to begin but here’s a start on correcting the stated facts and implications:

those eating whole foods and whose daily diet is at least half produce rarely if ever struggle with temptation and portion-control;

whole foods create more dopamine than any image of or taste of junk food;

using your body in a purposeful way creates dopamine

obesity is not the fault of biology but is rather the fault of modern culture and industrialized living;

getting access to a variety of foods (and the author seems to be suggesting it’s important to maintain one’s pleasure with a wide variety of junk foods) is only the spice of life for those trying to sell endless amounts of food —in fact, eating simply and repetitively within each season yields the greatest sensory pleasure, restores hardwired appetite controls, and minimizes our individual and collective environmental footprint.

Our culture doesn’t teach us how to love ourselves, each other, and the earth or how to live with purpose. Screens and apps aren’t a fix that sticks but they sure do make noise.

What can you do?

You can use the intersection where your body and your experience come together as the powerful pivot it is. You can use every eating occasion, every breath, every physical endeavor (whether a walk or simply standing up), every chosen ritual for starting and ending your day to remind your conscious self that you are precious and in charge.

You can practice taking charge, loving yourself and others, and making your own health-supporting culture by doing the very things which increase your dopamine levels organically —that is, eating whole foods, moving more, cultivating joy and purpose, engaging authentically with others and the natural world, things you can do without dependence on a single app, screen, or machine. One of the nicest ways to use technology when you do chose to use it is to listen to recorded music. Here’s a song to get you going.

To begin, you might want to kick everyone out of your mental and even physical space for a few minutes, a few hours, or even a whole day and tune into how you feel. How do you feel? How good do you want to feel? You are meant to feel strong, graceful, conscious, connected, loving, loved, capable. And the best app for that is inside yourself (no batteries required).